Of course the prize has gone to many impressive leaders, but often in a compromised way. Nelson Mandela accepted his alongside De Klerk, the man who had been his jailer.
The award may be considered inspiring, even as an undeserved � ���"call to action� �� � as a � ���"humbled� �� � Barack Obama explained, noting he doesn't compare himself to earlier � ���"transformational� �� � figures. But, recall also, as we must, it is not given out by peers or the experts who decide the scientific awards but by retired politicians with no expertise in peace-making.
Alexander Cockburn can always been counted on to seek out the hidden history, writing,
� ���"Woodrow Wilson, the liberal imperialist with whom Obama bears some marked affinities, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, having brought America into the carnage of the First World War. The peace laureate president who preceded him was Teddy Roosevelt, who got the prize in 1906 as reward for sponsorship of the Spanish-American war and ardent bloodletting in the Philippines. Senator George Hoar's famous denunciation of Roosevelt on the floor of the US Senate in May of 1902 was probably what alerted the Nobel Committee to Roosevelt's eligibility for the Peace Prize:
� ���"You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives� ��"the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture.� �� �
Lest we forget, and many of us have, we live in a universe driven by symbolic gestures, not necessarily real achievement, by perceptions, not realities. The Nobel Prize seeks to encourage change as well as honor it. The people ridiculing Obama, who did not seek the award and seemed as surprised as everyone else when he got it, tend to think one dimensionally about it even though the media role in all this may have had more to do with it than we realize.
Robert Naiman notes that the Nobel people are as interested in influencing events as in praising a president, � ���"That's what the Nobel Committee is trying to do for Obama now. It's giving an award to encourage the change in world relations that Obama has promised, and to try to help shield Obama against his domestic adversaries. The committee is well aware that history is contingent and that Obama might fail. It knows very well that the same country that elected Obama also gave the world George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.� �� � Bishop Tutu got his prize in l984 as an effort to encourage the fall of apartheid years before it fell.
That said, what Americans don't realize is that role the media played in this because of the differences between what people in other countries see and what we don't.
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